Songs of innocence and experience

PJ Harvey sings like a child on her new, stripped-down album, but it's full of grim subject matter. John Harris hears how the elusive singer-songwriter was just trying to get the soul back in her music

Polly Harvey's latest single is called When Under Ether. You may have heard it, perhaps on the occasions when Radio 1 DJs - usually, it has to be said, after dark - have decided to treat their listeners to the unbelievably sparse, gorgeously unsettling sound of a solitary voice and the barest of piano accompaniments. Its chorus, if such a word is appropriate, amounts to the occasional recitation of the words "human kindness", and it concludes in just over two minutes. If the prevailing sound of 2007 - chumbling indie-rock, of the kind associated with, say, thePigeon Detectives, or the faux-yobbery purveyed by the ubiquitous Hard-Fi - has an antidote, this is surely it.

"The funny thing was," she says, "the other day, I knew that Zane Lowe was going to play it. I'd been told: Radio 1, seven o'clock - so I was out in the garden listening. I never listen to Radio 1. So I put it on, and there was all this kind of noise happening, and all of a sudden he played When Under Ether, and there was something absolutely shocking about it. And that's great, isn't it?"

I meet Harvey in the garden of a pub in the Dorset village of Abbotsbury, close to her home, and only a short drive from the farm where she grew up. The last time I briefly interviewed her - in the autumn of 2000 - she was in New York and sporting the sleek, manicured look that went with the Mercury Prize-winning album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. By comparison, she now looks nigh-on unrecognisable - her hair has grown out into a tangle of curls, and she is dressed in functional attire that's uniformly black, a colour scheme that carries over into her chosen means of transport: a gleaming, jet-black utility vehicle that looks rather like a souped-up Land Rover.

In the context of her eighth album, the location is pretty much perfect. From its title onwards, White Chalk seems to be an evocation of the surroundings in which she was raised, and the mess of memory, love and loss that goes with them. As has long been the case, to ask her what particular songs are about is to invite a display of Olympic-standard evasiveness, and any attempted forays into her personal life will be politely stonewalled. Whether any given song is the stuff of fact, fiction or something in between is thus left unresolved, and her music - as she seems to see it, anyway - thereby retains a closel guarded integrity. That said, from the recurrently bucolic imagery to a pointed reference in the title track to a place where "Dorset cliffs meet the sea", it's obvious where the new album is set.

The record sounds as if it's populated by ghosts, full of strange, discomfiting music that often seems rooted in the distant past without ever succumbing to sepia-tinted pastiche - as she puts it, stuff that could be "from 100 years ago, or 100 years in the future". It all coheres into arguably the most perfectly realised album she has made. The prospect of a new PJ Harvey record is always bound up with reinvention - the charged-up, polished rock of Stories from the City ..., for example, was succeeded by the stripped-down grit that defined 2004's Uh Huh Her - but this album is pitched in virgin territory. Notably, there is barely a guitar to be heard, which serves to underline the fact that its 37-year-old author remains among the most restless, inventive and mysteriously underrated talents around.

White Chalk's genesis dates back to the tail-end of 2004, and a brief period during which Harvey told at least one journalist that she was considering enrolling as a mature student and studying English literature - something she claims to have been "seriously considering" (though at similarly loose-ended points in her career, she also admits to having entertained thoughts of dropping music in favour of nursing or becoming a vet). This time, however, something was definitely eating at her: the sense that since 1998's Is This Desire?, she had strayed some distance from being creatively satisfied. "I wasn't feeling like I'd done good work for quite a few years," she says. "I think that's quite natural; that people go through phases of great creativity and not-so-great creativity. But I felt like I'd been on the lower end of the curve for a while."

It's strange to hear her say that, because Stories from the City sounded like a very bold, peak-form, all-guns-blazing kind of record.

"It definitely did what I was trying to do - which was to make an album full of great pop songs. But that's not really where my heart is. It was more of an experiment with the craft rather than the heart, if that makes any sense. This album - and, I think, Is This Desire and To Bring You My Love - were times when I felt the craft and the heart married well. Other times, I just go through phases where it's more of an exercise in exploring something, and not really where I want to be in my soul."

For the most part, the new album was written in Dorset, on an instrument that served to propel her somewhere new: the piano, chosen because she felt she had to be "out of my depth" to find exactly where she ought to be heading. "It's entirely different from the guitar. It's like arriving at a giant beast. I had a piano sitting in my house for about three months before I even dared touch it. It's like a giant body - it's got a ribcage, teeth, tongues. It almost feels like it does you rather than you doing it.

"I wouldn't call myself a piano player," she says. "I think of what I do as quite hamfisted. I pretend that I'm a piano player: I go to the piano and I act like a virtuoso giving a concert."

She rolls back her sleeves, theatrically throws head back, and crashes her fingers down on pub table. "Ba-bammm! I do all the movements. You may laugh, but that's how the record came about. I'd improvise with myself, pretending I was a piano player, record it, find good bits, and elaborate on them. That's a completely different way of writing for me."

Though her piano technique was still in its infancy, she eventually resolved to play some of her new songs in front of an audience. When she performed solo at the Hay festival in May 2006, she confessed that she had never played a piano in public before, and that she felt nervous beyond words. "Every time I play a duff note," she told her audience, "I'm going to pull a face like Les Dawson."

"It was absolutely terrifying," she says. "I can't think of anything more terrifying than standing up on stage in front of a thousand people, on your own, not feeling like a musician."

Did the fear go?

"No. I've done five or six solo shows now, and I just spend the entire time in utter terror. It doesn't get any easier."

Then why do it?

"I just have to. I've got an overwhelming desire to sing and play music, particularly to people. I don't feel like I'd even be living out my role on earth if I didn't do it. I'd probably get ill quite quickly, just because I wasn't doing what I'm supposed to do."

But to do it on your own, without the safety net of a band ...

"Mmmm. But it feels very right at the moment. This feels absolutely like what I should be doing."

Perhaps the single most fascinating aspect of the new album is Harvey's voice. Whereas her vocals were once full of the nuances she imbibed from the soundtrack to her childhood (her father was a close friend of the Rolling Stones' de facto sixth member, their long-standing aide and piano player Ian Stewart; her parents, she once recalled, "played rock'n'roll and blues constantly - every day"), she has discovered a new voice: pure, intimate and uncharacteristically English.

"It took a long time to find out how I wanted to sing," she says. "It was trial and error, really, and quite a lot of thought about the aspects of my voice that I didn't find rewarding. And out of knowing what I didn't want to do came this new way of singing.

"I feel more English these days," she says, with an air of slight surprise. "I've become more and more aware that I'm an English woman, and I wanted to sing as an English woman. I grew up listening to blues music, and every record I ever heard was sung by Americans. You can't help but have that in your blood when it's all you hear, and I almost had to get back to who I am, and how I speak, and where I come from.

"Stylisation - that was what I didn't want to do. I didn't want to have caricatures going on in my voice. I wanted to sing in a very pure way, and not do, 'Here's the spooky voice,' and 'Here's the high Minny Mouse voice.' I'm so tired of that. So as a reminder to myself of how to sing, I'd put up Post-It notes around me, that said things like, 'Childlike' and 'Five years old'. I was trying to remember the purity of childhood - but childhood imagination, too, and the way that it can go absolutely anywhere. You can create an invisible friend, you can live in a castle - you can make anything out of nothing. Where does that go? I became really interested in trying to regain it, and at the same time, the voice took on this childlike, naive quality."

On a few occasions, the mixture of that affected innocence and the songs' subject matter takes the new album's unsettling quality to almost unbearable heights - as with the aforementioned When Under Ether, an apparent glimpse of the termination of a pregnancy whose most striking lyric runs as follows: "I lay on the bed/ Waist down undressed/ Look up at the ceiling/ Feeling happiness." It goes on: "Something's inside me/ Unborn and unblessed/ Disappears in the ether/ One world to the next."

I find that song very difficult to listen to, I tell her.

"Mmmm. [Pause] I don't. I find, erm ... [Pause] I can listen to it quite objectively. What are you laughing at?"

The idea that you can listen to it objectively. Because it's so visceral. It's raw.

"Yeah," she says. "So I can hear it as ... [Pause] Well, I don't feel attached to it in any way. But that's a process that seems to happen with every record and every song. I don't feel attached to them. They kind of do themselves, and they're nothing to do with me any more."

That sounds like one of Harvey's trademark evasions, but I make one last attempt at divining the song's source. I've just not heard anyone evoke the termination of a pregnancy as bluntly as that song does, I suggest. Certainly not in pop music.

"That's obviously what you hear, but for me it's not actually tied to anything specific, like an abortion." She pauses. "These aren't just words," she insists. "They're songs. They inhabit themselves, really."

Our time is almost up. In the car park, Harvey points out the remains of Abbotsbury's 11th-century abbey and a chapel dedicated to St Catherine - the patron saint of spinsters, she tells me - and then goes on her way. On my long journey home, I tune into Radio 1, and hear Zane Lowe once again playing When Under Ether, which sounds every bit as singular as Harvey had suggested. By comparison, the music that follows it seems hollow and generic, which rather puts me in mind of something she had said earlier on - an outburst, by her standards, in which she said her sense was that the quality of music, literature and film seems to be going "down and down and down, and I struggle so hard to get excited about anything".

Characteristically, she wouldn't be drawn on exactly who or what she was railing against, but lurking in what she said, there was a kind of mission statement. "There's too much of everything in the world, but particularly too much of everything that's not all that good. The world doesn't need any more art that's just all right. It only needs mind-blowing, inspirational, life-changing stuff." White Chalk is out now on Island